Paul McAuley: Child of the River

“Then the job I did with you—”

“Yes, yes,” Tamora said impatiently. “On Gorgo’s commission. He didn’t really expect me to succeed, but he was still angry when I told him that we’d killed the merchant and hadn’t been able to collect the fee.”

“And that is why you agreed to help me.”

“Not exactly. Yama, we don’t have time for this.”

“I need to know, Tamora.”

Yama understood now why Tamora had embarked on such a risky enterprise, but he still did not understand why Gorgo wanted him dead.

Tamora hung her head for a moment, then said with a mixture of vulnerability and defiance, “I suppose it’s only fair. The star-sailor job would have paid well, but we lost the fee because you went crazy and grabbed that circlet. And I still owe Gorgo, and I was going off to work for you, as he saw it. I said he should wait and I’d pay back everything, but he’s greedy. He wants the liver and the lights as well as the meat and bones.”

Yama nodded. “He decided to kill me and steal the money I have.”

“He said that he would rob you, not kill you. He said it was only fair, because you’d lost him the fee for killing the merchant. I didn’t know he’d try and kill you. I swear it.”

“I believe you,” Yama said. “And I know that Gorgo found someone else to help you with the job in the Palace of the Memory of the People. He wanted me out of the way.”

“A man with red skin and welts on his chest. I told Gorgo that I was going to work with you, Yama, and no other, but Gorgo said the man would be waiting for me at the Palace gate. I went there, but I couldn’t find the man and I went back to the inn and found that you had come here.”

“Well, the man you were waiting for was here. It was he who tried to kill me.”

“I was going to tell you everything,” Tamora said. “I decided something, while I was waiting. Hear me out. I made an agreement with you, and I will stick with it. Fuck Gorgo. When the job is finished I’ll find him and kill him.”

“Then you will work for me, and not Gorgo?”

“Isn’t that what I said?” Tamora said impatiently. “But there isn’t time to stand and talk a moment longer, not now! You’ve been lying around in bed, and then fooling about in this mausoleum, and meanwhile I have been busy. We have already missed one appointment, and we must not miss the second, or the contract will be voided. Can you ride?”

“A little.”

“That had better mean you can ride like the wind.” Tamora seemed to notice Pandaras for the first time. “What happened to the rat-boy?”

“A blow to the head. Luckily, the assassin Gorgo hired had some scruples.”

“Maybe it’ll have knocked some of his airs out and let some sense in. I suppose you still want to bring him? Well, I’ll carry him for you. Why are you staring at me? Do you call off our contract after all this?”

“I have already woken things best left sleeping. If I go on, what else might I do?”

Tamora said briskly, “Would you emasculate yourself, then? If you don’t know who you are and where you came from, then you can’t know what you can become. Come with me, or not. I’m taking the job anyway, because I’ll get paid for it with you or without you. And when I’ve finished there, I’ll kill Gorgo.”

She slung Pandaras over her shoulder and walked away with a quick, lithe step, as if the boy weighed nothing at all.

After a moment, Yama followed.

It was dusk. Warm lights glowed in windows of the houses around the mossy plaza. Two horses were tethered to a pole topped by a smoky, guttering cresset. Tamora and Yama lifted Pandaras onto the withers of her mount, and then she vaulted easily into the saddle behind him. She leaned down and told Yama, “I had to pay the painted witch a fortune for the hire of these. Don’t stand and gape. Already it may be too late.”

The horses were harnessed cavalry-fashion, with light saddles and high stirrups. Yama had just grasped the horn of his mount’s saddle and fitted his left foot in the stirrup, ready to swing himself up, when the ground shook. The horse jinked and as Yama tried to check it, he saw a beam of light shoot up through the aperture of the domed roof of the Black Temple.

The light was as red as burning sulfur, with flecks of violet and vermilion whirling in it like sparks flying up a chimney. It burned high into the sky, so bright that it washed the temple and the square in bloody light.

Yama realized at once what was happening, and knew that he must confront what he had wakened. He was horribly afraid of it, but if he did not face it then he would always be afraid.

He threw the reins of his mount to Tamora and ran up the steps into the temple. As he entered the long atrium, the floor groaned and heaved, like an animal tormented by biting flies.

Yama fell headlong, picked himself up, and ran on toward the column of red light that burned up from the well and filled the temple with its fierce glare.

The temple was restless. The stone of its walls squealed and howled; dust and small fragments rained down from the ceiling.

Several of the pillars on either side had cracked from top to bottom; one had collapsed across the floor, its heavy stone discs spilled like a stack of giant coins. The intricate mosaics of the floor were fractured, heaved apart in uneven ripples. A long ragged crack ran back from the well, and the two old priests stood on either side of it, silhouetted in the furnace light. Balcus had drawn his sword and held it above his head in pitiful defiance; Antros knelt with the heels of his hands pressed to his eyes, chanting over and over an incantation or prayer.

The language was a private dialect of the priests’ bloodline, but its rhythm struck deep in Yama. He fell to his knees beside the old priest and began to chant too.

It was not a prayer, but a set of instructions to the guards of the temple.

He was repeating it for a third time when the black mesh curtain which divided the right-hand apse from the atrium was struck aside. Two, four, five of the giant soldiers marched out. The red light gleamed like fresh blood on their transparent carapaces.

The two old priests immediately threw themselves full-length on the floor, but Yama watched with rapt fascination.

The five soldiers were the only survivors of the long sleep of the temple’s guards. One dragged a stiff leg, and another was blind and moved haltingly under the instructions of the others, but none of them had forgotten their duty. They took up position, forming a five-pointed star around the well, threw open their chest-plates and drew out bulbous silver tubes as long as Yama was tall. Yama supposed that the soldiers would discharge their weapons into the well, but instead they aimed at the coping and floor around it and fired as one.

One of the weapons exploded, blowing the upper part of its owner to flinders; from the others, violet threads as intensely bright as the sun raked stone until it ran like water into the well. Heat and light beat at Yama’s skin; the atrium filled with the acrid stench of burning stone. The floor heaved again, a rolling ripple that snapped mosaics and paving slabs like a whip and threw Yama and the priests backward.

And the Thing Below rose up from the white-hot annulus around its pit.

It was brother to the feral machine that Yama had inadvertently drawn down at the merchant’s house, although it was very much larger. It barely cleared the sides of the well—black, spherical, and bristling with mobile spines. It had grown misshapen during its long confinement, like a spoiled orange that flattens under its own weight.

The giant soldiers played violet fire across the machine, but it took no notice of them. It hung in the midst of its column of red light and looked directly into Yama’s head.